Staff Development Report

Akin Road Elementary

The staff development goal for Akin Road Elementary during the 22-23 school year was: We will dedicate time to strengthening our understanding of district reading competencies and instructional strategies. We continue to put a major focus on Equity and how to connect our young learners to conversations about celebrating differences and how to recognize and react to prejudice and stereotypes as a staff. We utilized staff meeting times for group discussions aimed at allowing staff to grow both personally and professionally to see every learner’s worth and embrace human diversity in each other and our community.  At the end of the year, they shared their learning with the rest of the staff. 


Farmington Elementary


Our Farmington Elementary staff development goal was to continue the 7 Mindsets with the students and families of our community.  We continued all school projects, morning meetings and school and home connections through involving parents in volunteer opportunities in the school.  7 Mindsets is a social emotional curriculum that introduces 7 different Mindsets throughout the year.  We spoke a lot about how the social emotional needs of our students need to be met before we can expect them to sit down and do the academics piece.  Getting to know how our students learn is important in building the trust with them.  We were also very purposeful to do this with support staff like paraprofessionals, administrative assistants, nurse, etc.  We saw positive interactions with students and teachers and relationships becoming stronger. Throughout the year we also focused on mindfulness for our teachers, as we know the impact stress can take on for teachers.  This year we will also be focusing on family support.  We will be having several Parent Nights to help engage parents in subjects like Mental Health, Anxiety and Social Media awareness.


Meadowview Elementary

The percentage of students in grades 3-5 at Meadowview Elementary School who meet or exceed their spring 2022 to spring 2023 growth projection, and percentage of students in grade 2 who meet or exceed their fall 2022 to spring 2023 growth projection as measured by the NWEA Reading Assessment, will increase from 62% to 64%.
 
Throughout the 2022-23 school year, we focused on revisiting our key learning priorities in literacy at each grade level and developed a pacing guide to layer (and spiral) the skills.  As we dove deeper into the Science of Reading and our understanding of the Scarborough’s Reading Rope, we gained a stronger understanding of where our students were along the continuum of learning to read.  We dedicated ourselves to the understanding and administration of better diagnostic assessments in an effort to deeply understand our learners and their need.  We also focused on how we scheduled our 90 minute literacy blocks to use that time in the most intentional and effective way possible. In an effort to keep learning more, we allocated time for weekly staff meetings that were largely rooted in professional development and we financially invested in literacy related growth, such as our Communities of Practice.  While we were not able boost the number of students who met or exceeded their growth projections, were able to maintain our MCA reading scores while also seeing an increase in our Multilingual learners and Special Ed learners.  We feel confident that we are making progress and will continue to do so with our efforts to grow professionally and align our instruction based on the Science of Reading.


North Trail Elementary

In 2022-2023 our staff development focus was on development our Building Operational Plan. Time was spent in the areas of equity, literacy, student support strategies/social emotional learning, and family engagement.
 
Back to School Workshop week began with a professional development session with Jen Jones. Topics focused on development skills in the Big 5 of Reading: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension. These sessions supported the work done throughout the district by our district teaching and learning team. Other professional development sessions were held with our district team to focus on resources that support the Big 5 as well as introductions to our new Core Phonics assessments. More work will be done in the coming years to support staff as they develop literacy skills using the Science of Reading and in response to Minnesota’s READ Act.
 
Student support was another focus throughout the year. District psychologists supported our work as we continue to research de-escalation strategies that meet the needs of our learners. Staff participated in learning communities surrounding our social emotional needs and how we might better serve the needs of our learners. Staff decided that in 2023-34 we will use a resource called Be Good People to work within our PBIS framework of ROAR to help provide consistent and systemic lessons that help support social emotional strategies and needs seen in our building. Another committee focused on student and family engagement – starting the conversation for how to create engaging experiences for learners and families in our school community.
 
Teachers throughout the building worked individually, as teams, and groups throughout the year to explore equity goals. Many staff participated in book studies, dove into district resources provided by our equity leadership team and researched ways to enhance diversity in our curriculum. This equity work has a positive impact on all students at NTE in terms of academic achievement, relationships, and a sense of self in our schools.


Riverview Elementary

The RVES building goal for 2022-2023 was: "The percentage of all students in grades 2-5 at Riverview Elementary who meet or exceed their individual fall to spring Reading RIT Growth goal, as indicated by their performance on the NWEA MAP assessment, will increase from 45.9% during the 2021-2022 school year to 47% in Spring 2023." Our final data showed that we feel short of this goal as 45.5% of Gr2-5 students at RVES met or exceeded their NWEA MAP Fall to Spring reading growth goal in 2022-23.
 
The work we did as a staff to improve our literacy outcomes was significant. Teachers from all grade levels and departments participated in professional learning committees. 19 classroom teachers participated in a Community of Practices focusing on research on six shifts to make in their approach to early reading instruction on phonemic awareness, phonics, high frequency words, comprehension, and texts for beginning readers.  As a whole staff, as we began to navigate and learn more about best practices in reading instruction, we were provided with a clearer picture about reading difficulties and how to prevent them. We drew on solid scientific research and began to change our practices to make informed approaches to reading instruction. We feel strong positive momentum and like we are on our way to increasing the effectiveness of our tier 1 and tier 2 instruction.
 
Here’s some additional detail if you are interested: MAP Growth Results 2022-23 Fall to Spring RVES


Boeckman Middle School

The Boeckman Middle School staff of about 65 focused their professional development on the core components of the Personalized Learning Honeycomb, and implementation of competency based rubrics in place of letter grades.  This year we utilized a teacher in a half time facilitator of instruction support position in our three learning models.  She was able to meet individually with teachers to set goals around reporting and personalizing learning opportunities. She also works with leadership around development and implementation of professional development for staff. 

We also dedicated much of our professional development during the 22-23 school year to supporting a PBIS coach and a team of teachers that made up our PBIS committee. The coach and committee attended PBIS regional trainings and brought back professional development opportunities for all staff. As a result of this professional development, we have implemented behavior matrix in all learning and common spaces at school, provided a learning matrix for distance learning, created tools to reinforce positive behaviors and structure learning experiences around undesired minor behaviors. We bridged the work with the Personalized Learning Honeycomb and PBIS through the implementation of  Personal Skills for Success. The Personal Skills for Success provide a framework for teachers to facilitate student learning of executive functioning skills.  The work done last year has led us to focus on the integration of competency, personalized learning, and equitable practices for the 22-23 school year with the goal being that we are identifying student needs and meeting those with appropriately designed personalized instruction.

Dodge Middle School

At Levi P. Dodge Middle School, our goal was to offer more personalized professional development opportunities for all staff. Our staff of teachers, paraprofessionals, and licensed non-instructional staff engaged in self-directed high quality staff development opportunities by meeting in purposeful department specific teams, grade level teams, and full school trainings. Additionally, individuals were given 8 hours to personalize their own professional development. Examples include webinars, podcasts, book studies, courses, and content specific conferences. We found teachers felt comfortable taking risks to customize their own learning. This naturally modeled, for students, the power of taking calculated risks and not allowing perceived “failure” to limit how they learn or their potential. This goal is a work in progress, and staff at Dodge Middle School are moving forward on personalizing learning for students and personalizing professional development for themselves. Additionally, we have aligned our resources so that we will again have a Facilitator of Instructional Support to enhance the professional growth of staff at a personal level. 

Farmington High School

At Farmington High School, our goal is to increase the percentage of all students enrolled in grade 11 at Farmington High School who take the ACT and meet or exceed ALL 4 of the College Readiness Benchmarks as measured by ACT from 17% in 2022 to 19% in 2023. To help with this, our staff development focused on components of personalized learning, flexible learning, and competencies. Our staff really dug into the profiles of a lifelong learner and aligned those attributes with their course syllabus. We had a few different departments take the lead on competency based reporting and found ways to communicate this information via Infinite Campus.